Frequently asked questions

1. Install Fenzly from the App Store or Google Play.
2. Sign in with your phone number or your email: you receive a one-time code, there is no password to remember.
3. Pick a display name, the one your circle will see.
4. Grant the permissions the app asks for: location “Always”, notifications, and on Android the battery-optimisation exemption. Without them Fenzly cannot detect your arrivals while it runs in the background.
5. Create a circle, or join someone’s circle with the code they sent you.

The guide First launch and permissions walks through every screen.

Your account is identified by a verified channel: a phone number or an email address. Every time you sign in, Fenzly sends you a one-time code by SMS or by email, valid for a few minutes.

So there is no password to invent, forget or leak. If the SMS does not arrive, ask for the code by email, or the other way round: both channels open the same account once you have verified them in the settings.

Not at the same time. A Fenzly account is active on one device at a time: if you sign in on a second phone or a tablet, the first one is signed out. It says so on screen, and you receive an email about it, in case it was not you.

The reason is end-to-end encryption: your keys, places, circles and messages live only on your phone, and the server cannot copy them to another device because it cannot read them. Using several devices in parallel is being looked at, but is not available yet.

To move from one phone to another without losing anything, follow the guide Switching phones: the new phone gets a fresh backup from the old one before taking over.

Fenzly uses Double Ratchet end-to-end encryption, the same protocol family as Signal and WhatsApp, to protect your locations. It runs on Olm, an open-source implementation whose core library was independently audited. Every location update is encrypted on your device, individually for each recipient, before it is ever sent.

The server only ever carries opaque encrypted data: it knows neither your coordinates, nor the names of your places, nor who is in your circles. Even we, who operate the service, cannot read your location.

No. Fenzly is built on a blind server model:

• your GPS coordinates and the names of your places are encrypted and never readable server-side;
• your presence at a place is computed on your phone, never transmitted;
• your address book and the composition of your circles stay on your device only.

The server is an encrypted relay and a switchboard: it knows whom to forward a message to, never what it contains. What it holds comes down to your account, your devices and your subscription receipts, and you can check that yourself by requesting the “What the server knows about me” export from the app. Your data is hosted in Switzerland, in line with the GDPR and the Swiss nDPA.

Only the members of the circles you chose to share with, and only what you chose to share. Each circle has its own setting: arrivals and departures at the circle’s places, your latest position, or nothing at all. You can change it at any time from the circle.

Live sharing, started from the map or a conversation, is time-limited and stops by itself when the chosen duration ends.

Fenzly itself never sees your position: it is encrypted on your phone, for each recipient, before it is sent.

Your contacts stay on your phone. To find someone who already uses Fenzly, the app compares fingerprints (a hash of the email or number), never the data itself, and only if you turned that search on.

Discovery by email is on by default, discovery by phone number is off by default. You can change both in your profile, and nothing is sent unless you use the search.

A place is a spot you name: home, school, the office. It is stored on your phone, with its coordinates and radius.

A circle is a group of people: your family, a duo, a team. The circle is where you choose which places you share and what its members learn about you.

When a member arrives at a shared place of the circle, the other members are told, if that member chose to share those events. A place can be shared in several circles, or in none.

From the circle, generate an invitation code. It looks like FZ-7K4M-92 and comes with a fenzly.app/c/… link you can send in a message.

The invited person types the code into Fenzly, or opens the link. You then receive a request to confirm: nobody enters your circle without your consent. They then choose for themselves what they share.

A code is valid for seven days and about ten uses, then it expires. The server only knows the code and its owner, never the circle it opens.

In a family circle, a guardian can designate a member as a child. Their account stays a normal Fenzly account, with its own keys and its own data, but the app applies guardrails:

• the child communicates and shares only with the members of their family circles, plus the contacts a guardian explicitly allowed;
• they cannot create a circle, invite anyone, or add a contact;
• an invitation or a message from anyone else is blocked before it even reaches them, and the guardian sees those attempts;
• the guardian can require location sharing to stay on;
• the child keeps the SOS button, which alerts their guardians.

Designating a child requires parental consent: a code sent by SMS to the guardian’s verified number. Fenzly keeps only a receipt of that consent (identifiers, method, date) so it can be demonstrated, never the names or the composition of the family. The child’s positions stay end-to-end encrypted like everyone else’s.

Fenzly does not know the members’ ages: child mode ends when a guardian removes the designation, and not before. The guide Turning on child mode details the steps.

It is Fenzly’s “on my way”: your real-time position, sent to a person or a circle, for a duration you choose. It stops by itself: when the chosen time is up, at the end of the day, or when you arrive if you set a destination, in which case your people also see an estimated arrival time.

It starts in one gesture, with no invitation to accept on the other side. The person sees a card in the conversation, “sharing their position live, 42 min left”, and your marker moves on their map. You can stop it at any time, from the map or the banner at the top of the screen.

How it differs from sharing in a circle: the circle is permanent and quiet, arrivals and departures at shared places and last known position; live sharing is temporary and continuous. It works even if your circle sharing is set to “Nothing”, and it uses almost nothing while you are not moving.

The position leaves end-to-end encrypted, for each recipient. If someone you do not know sends you a share, it lands in “Requests” and nothing shows on your map until you accept. The guide Sharing my position live details the steps.

The Places tab sorts your places into two lists, and a third notion comes from the circles:

• Favorite places (★): the spots that matter to you, home, school, the office. They are watched at all times: Fenzly detects your arrivals and departures, even with the app closed, even in the Simple recording mode. They are the only places you can share with a circle.
• Visited places: everything else your history knows, the stops you named along your trips and the addresses saved without pinning them. Each keeps its visit count and the date of the last one. They are not watched, trigger no alert and cannot be shared. A visited place becomes a favorite in one gesture, and the other way round.
• Shared places: a favorite you add to a circle becomes a place of the circle. Its definition, name, position, radius, photo, is sent to every member, who each detect their own passages there without creating anything. Only the circle’s guardians or admins can edit it; the star and the category stay personal.

A circle place shows in your favorites with the circle’s chip. If you leave the circle, the places you had starred stay with you as personal places, the others are removed. Notifications about members’ arrivals are set in the circle, not on the place. The guide Organising my places walks through each gesture.

There is only one kind of circle, and it serves every purpose: a family, a couple, a flat share, a group of friends. Create one per group that matters, each with its name, colour, shared places and conversation. The same person can be a member of several circles, and what they share is set circle by circle.

What makes the difference between a “family” circle and a “friends” circle is what you do with it:

• Sharing is always an individual choice. Each member picks their own mode: everything, the circle’s places, the latest position, or nothing. A friends’ circle set to “Circle places” or “Off” reveals only what each person decided.
• Roles. Whoever creates the circle is its guardian: they manage members and shared places, and can appoint other guardians. The others are adults, or children if a guardian designates them so, with parental consent. Child mode only makes sense in a family circle.
• SOS. An SOS alert goes to all your circles by default. For a friends’ circle, you can exclude it from your alerts in its settings.

A couple is simply a circle with two members. The server, for its part, knows neither the circle’s name nor who is in it: that composition lives only on the members’ phones. The guide Creating a circle and inviting members details the steps.

Only if you ask it to. It all depends on the recording mode chosen in the settings:

• Simple: Fenzly only notes your arrivals and departures at your favorite places. No trip, very little battery.
• Detailed: Fenzly can record your movements, either on demand from the map with “Start a trip”, or automatically when it detects that you are moving, for the kinds of movement you tick: car, bicycle, on foot, running, bus, train. The transport mode is recognised during the trip.

A recorded trip keeps its route, duration, distance, speeds and elevation, in the Trips tab. It lives only on your phone, and you can correct or delete it.

Your people only see a trip if you share “Everything” with their circle. They then see a line in their feed, “Trip 22 min · 9.4 km”, with no detail. If you turn on Detailed trips for that circle, they can also open the trip: route, speeds, elevation. Everything leaves end-to-end encrypted; the server knows nothing of it. The guide Recording and sharing my trips details the settings.

Yes. The Active trip screen is a full GPS activity recorder, with no smartwatch and no third-party account: start a trip from the map, pick the activity type, walking, running, cycling, or leave automatic detection on, and go. During the session the screen shows live speed, average speed, distance covered, elapsed time and your track on the map, with a heading-up view if you prefer.

When you stop, the session joins My trips with its route, duration, distance, average and maximum speed and its elevation profile. You can file it, hike, bike ride, or a category of your own, and export it as GPX to open it in any other app.

The History tab then gathers all your outings by week, month or year: number of sessions, kilometres added up, filters by category. A group outing has one more asset: the members of your circle show on the trip map, with their distance from you, end-to-end encrypted like everything else. Your sessions never leave your phone, other than towards the circles you choose. The guide Recording a walk, a run or a bike ride walks through the screen step by step.

For keeping an unlimited history without your phone or your backups growing without end. A trip recorded in Detailed mode is several hundred GPS points. After a few months of automatic recording, those points make up most of the space Fenzly uses and of the size of every backup, while most of them no longer serve any purpose: a track draws just as well with ten times fewer points.

The option, on by default in Settings → History, therefore does this:

• It only touches trips older than 30 days. A recent outing keeps every point, leaving time to review it, correct it or export it as GPX at full resolution.
• It freezes the figures first. Distance, duration, average and maximum speed, elevation are computed and stored on the trip before any simplification: what you then read on the card or in the history does not change.
• It then simplifies the track, keeping only the points that matter for the shape of the route, to within 5 metres, plus the start, the finish and the top-speed point. On screen, the track looks the same.

The result is storage five to ten times lighter for old trips, faster backups, and a history that stays complete as far back as you go. Turn the option off if you want to keep every point of every trip, for instance to re-export old outings as GPX in full detail; the price is heavier storage and backups. The depth of the history is set separately, with the retention duration (guide Reading my history).

Your life on the move, seen from three angles, over the period of your choice, this week, this month or this year:

• Places: where you spent your time. Each place with its number of visits and the time added up, ranked by frequency or by duration. A place opens on its detail: time spent per day, per week or per month, entries and exits.
• Categories: the same reading by theme, home, work, sport, shops, restaurants, or the categories you created. How long at the office this month, how many visits to the club this year.
• Trips: your trips, grouped by day, with the number of trips and the total distance over the period, filterable by trip category, hiking, cycling, work, or your own.

This is what sets Fenzly apart from apps that only show the last thirty days: the history goes back as far as you decide, a setting letting you keep everything or limit it to 24, 12 or 6 months. It holds only your own data, computed on your phone from what you recorded: none of this history exists on the server side. The guide Reading my history details each view.

Not in normal use. Fenzly does not track your route continuously: it reacts to events, an arrival at or a departure from a place, a trip that starts or ends. When you sit at home, the app uses almost nothing.

Check, in order:

1. The place is shared in the circle by the person concerned, and you turned notifications on for that place (the option “Be notified when a circle member arrives at … or leaves”).
2. Location is set to “Always”, not “While using the app”. On iOS that choice is offered a second time a few days after install: refuse the downgrade.
3. On Android, battery optimisation is off for Fenzly. Some manufacturers (Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo) kill background apps regardless: add Fenzly to the protected apps in the manufacturer’s settings.
4. The other person’s phone has network. A member with no connection for several hours is flagged on the map.

All four points must hold on both phones: the one detecting the arrival and the one receiving the notification.

Fenzly only tells you what you asked for, except for an SOS:

• Arrivals and departures: “Emma arrived at School”. Nothing by default. In each circle you choose, place by place and member by member, whether you want to be told about entering, leaving, or both.
• Messages: each conversation is muted separately, from its menu.
• Invitations and requests: someone invites you into a circle, or asks to join yours with your code.
• Live sharing: someone close starts sharing their position with you.
• SOS: the alert of a member of your circles. It rings loudly and repeats until an adult takes charge; it cannot be muted.
• Your account: a new device signs into your account, or your new phone asks for a backup.

The text of the notifications is composed on your phone, from the encrypted data: the server only sends a wake-up signal, with no name and no place. On Android, a discreet “Fenzly active” notification stays on permanently: it is what lets the app watch your places while closed; it can be minimised but not removed. The guide Setting my notifications goes through every setting.

The round red button on the map sends an alert to every member of your family circles, with your position. After a ten-second countdown, which you can cancel with a swipe, the alert goes out and their phones ring, loudly and repeatedly, until an adult of the circle takes charge.

What happens next, in order:

1. Your people are alerted and see your position on the map, even if your sharing was off, for the duration of the alert.
2. A guardian or an adult taps “I’m taking charge”: the ringing stops for everyone and you see who is looking after you.
3. If nobody has seen the alert after two minutes, Fenzly sends an SMS to every member with a verified number. The SMS says your position is in the app; it never contains the position itself. Your screen then offers to call someone close or the emergency services.

A false alarm is cancelled from the alert screen: members are told. With no network, the app says so plainly, puts calling first, and keeps the alert queued to send it as soon as the connection is back.

Your position stays end-to-end encrypted: the server knows an alert happened, when, who was alerted and who took charge, never where you are. The SOS button does not replace the emergency services: in immediate danger, call first. The guide Using the SOS button covers the setup and the receiving side.

Because your data exists only on your phone. The Fenzly server knows neither your places, nor your circles, nor your messages: it cannot give anything back if the phone is lost, broken or replaced.

The backup is encrypted before it leaves the device. Two modes exist: the automatic backup, whose key is split into two halves that neither Fenzly nor your cloud space can read alone, and the Fenzly-hosted backup, protected by a recovery code only you hold.

Turn it on from day one in Settings → Backup, then check the date of the last backup from time to time.

Sign in on the new phone with the same number or email. Fenzly recognises your account and asks whether you still have the old phone.

• You still have it: open Fenzly on it. It detects the migration and offers to back up and transfer your data. Confirm: a fresh backup goes out, the new phone receives it and restores your places, circles and conversations, with nothing lost.
• You no longer have access to it (lost, broken, wiped): Fenzly restores the latest existing backup and shows its date. Messages received after that backup cannot be recovered, a consequence of end-to-end encryption.

Fenzly is active on one device at a time: once the restore is confirmed, the old phone is signed out and says so. In automatic mode, use the same Google Drive or iCloud account on both phones, that is where the backup lives. The guide Switching phones details the steps.

The backup holds everything that lives only on your phone: your encryption keys first, the vital part, then your places, circles, contacts and conversation history, photos included. It is encrypted on the phone before it leaves, and nobody can read it on the way or where it is kept.

Two possible locations, your choice:

• Your personal cloud, Google Drive on Android or iCloud on iPhone: this is the default. The key protecting the backup is split into two halves, one at Fenzly, the other in your cloud. Neither is any use alone: neither Fenzly nor your cloud can read the backup, and you have nothing to remember.
• Fenzly hosting, in Switzerland: offered at setup, and automatically when your cloud is full. The backup is then protected by a 30-digit recovery code that only you hold; without it, it cannot be recovered on another phone. You can keep a copy of the code in your cloud to find it automatically; it stays unreadable to Fenzly.

In both cases the backup runs by itself when you open the app, and a banner warns you if it fails or is not set up. You can also export an encrypted file to keep wherever you like. The guide Setting up the backup details each setting.

Fenzly is a paid service, with no ads and no data resale: that is what lets us know nothing about you. Every new account starts with a 14-day trial, no card required.

Then one person in the circle takes a subscription, Mono, Duo or Family, in the App Store or Google Play, and assigns a license to each member. Members pay nothing. Prices are shown in your device’s store.

An account whose license expired is not deleted: it keeps seeing what others share, without sharing itself, until a license is assigned to it.

The subscription is managed by the store where you bought it, not by Fenzly. The shortest path: in Fenzly, Settings → Subscription and license → Manage opens your subscription directly in the App Store or Google Play. You can also get there yourself:

• iPhone: Settings → your name → Subscriptions → Fenzly → Cancel.
• Android: Google Play → your profile → Payments and subscriptions → Subscriptions → Fenzly → Cancel.

Access stays open until the end of the period already paid, for you and for the members you assigned a license to. Fenzly can neither cancel nor refund on your behalf: refunds are requested from Apple or Google.

A subscription is a set of identical licenses, paid by one person: Mono holds one, Duo two, Family eight. The payer assigns a license to each member of their circles; each license covers one person, whatever their circles and role.

An assignment is an invitation: the person receives a license offer in the app and accepts it, or declines. Until they answer, the license is reserved for them. The payer can take a license back at any time; the person is told and keeps sharing for three days, time enough to sort things out.

Every account starts with a 14-day trial, with no card and no automatic billing. Without a license at the end of the trial, or after a subscription ends, the account goes into spectator mode: it still sees what its people share and keeps its conversations, but no longer shares its position or records its trips, until a license is assigned to it again.

The subscription is tied to your Fenzly account, not to your phone: a Google Play subscription stays valid on an iPhone, and the other way round. Two active subscriptions for the same payer do not add up; the most generous one is used and the other expires by itself. The guide Assigning licenses to my circle details the steps.

From the app: Settings → Account → Delete my account. A confirmation code is sent to you, then the deletion is immediate and permanent. Without access to the app, use the site’s Delete my account page.

What happens: your account and keys are erased from the server, your devices wipe their local data at their next launch, and you disappear from your circles. Your backups are erased too, the Fenzly-hosted ones as well as the key share that made the automatic backup readable: nothing can be restored afterwards, there is no way back. Export your data first if you want to keep a copy.

A running subscription is not refunded by this action, cancel it first in the store. If you are the only guardian of a child in a circle, appoint another guardian first: deletion is blocked while a child depends on you alone.

Yes, at two levels, both from Settings → Account:

• My data on this device: a readable file (compressed JSON) with your places, circles and messages, created on the phone. It holds your own data only.
• What the server knows about me: a nearly empty document, on purpose. It lists your account, your devices and your subscription receipts, and that is everything the server holds.

Both exports are immediate and involve no human operator.